And don’t screw around with it - make the coin $1 quadrillion, so we don’t have to mess with this for a long time.
And then we can have the next Ocean’s Eleven sequel be about a heist of the quadrillion-dollar coin, perhaps involving some sleight of hand and a worthless replica.
It would top virtually every other heist movie for Maguffin value.
Don’t tell Nicholas Cage.
It would be challenged as unconstitutional, and there’s a good chance that lawsuit would win. The Executive can’t just raise revenue on his own
Except for himself (or else CFEFWSG would owe the country a SAE shit-ton).
Who would have standing? And issuing money is different than raising revenue, in my understanding. But in any case, this would be a last resort. I’d like to see Biden say, a day or two before default, “if the Senate doesn’t act to raise the debt limit, I will be forced to meet our financial obligations by any means within my powers, which may include minting a trillion dollar coin. This would be a very unusual step, but I will not allow the good faith and credit of the United States to be harmed by the failure of the Senate. Such unusual steps are still preferable to default.”
Maybe that would motivate a handful of Republicans. And if not, then it’s still preferable to default.
A good question I’m not sure I have the answer to at the moment, but that leads me to another question: would you want to print money know that it could be invalidated by courts at some later point? It’s not like we’re debating a tax law that would raise revenue and then at some point stop because it ceases to function. We’d be raising questions about the reliability of the US treasury, which could raise some bright red flags about “full faith and credit.” Not sure that’s really the path to go down.
A possible path forward I’ve heard has to do with a combination of things, ranging from repealing the Trump tax cuts to increased enforcement aimed at auditing the wealthy and corporations. The latter is probably something that might be a long shot as Republicans would view a focus of federal power on the elite as the anathema. I’d thought there might be room to wiggle on the amount of the stimulus but apparently, Manchin is pretty firm on the $1.5 trillion amount.
This drives me nuts about Manchin. From what I can tell, he ignores the fact that we have global supply chain bottlenecks and a brewing energy crunch, mainly because of COVID and the fact that domestic oil production and LNG declined rapidly during the pandemic due to a collapse in demand. I mean, that’s our inflation. That’s our price tag. Putting money in the hands of consumers is what enabled us to keep the economy going during an unprecedented collapse in spending. And yet he’s basically making it doubly difficult for working poor families to escape the chains of poverty, while those who have six figure salaries working from home are going to be absolutely fine. He’s fucking over people his own state, really. And yet nobody brings this to his attention.
ETA: I fact checked - turns out Manchin has complained about the fed, so he’s at least consistent in that regard.
Or C. Montgomery Burns.
People in his state don’t see it this way. They see it as Manchin fucking over the Democrats. That may sound ridiculous, but remember these are the same people refusing vaccines for absurd reasons even as their friends and family die of Covid.
I’ve got a crazy idea: How about we stop printing and spending so much money? Canada is also doing this same crazy spending shit at a time when we aren’t in recession, inflation is increasing, supply chains are failing and 8 million job openings in the US are going unfilled. This is anti-Keynesian madness. We should be raising taxes and cutting spending right now to lower the debt and curb inflation.
You guys act like debt and deficits are merely abstractions that can be solved with a vote. You spend 3.5 trillion more with money you’ve just printed, and you and your kids will be paying for it for decades.
If this spending drives up inflation further, the peoole hit the hardest will be the poor and middle class. It will suppress real wages, raise the price of the things the poor and middle class need, and if interest rates rise to fight it, it will hobble the government and everyone else with interest payments and crater the economy.
TAANSTAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
The best thing that could happen to Biden and the Democrats would be for that bill to go down in flames. Because otherwise the results will be all on them, and they won’t be pretty.
Biden’s popularity collapse has made shutting this down easier for Republicans and moderates. Everyone believes the Democrats are getting wiped out in the House next year, so the moderates in the Democratic party are suddenly getting cold feet about that giant progressive grab bag of a bill. In a ‘change’ election, every moderate Democrat in the House will be at risk, and they know it. A vote for 3.5 trillion in progressive wish-list items will doom Congresspeople in swing districts.
I agree that too much of the wrong kind of stimulus can push inflation - one of the reasons why I’m not for an across-the-board $15 minimum wage hike. But the kinds of support that are contained in the stimulus are much less likely to do that. It’s targeted aid for working class families, some of which comes in the form of tax credits - something Republicans never seem to object to whenever they’re in power. If there’s spending that should be curtailed, it should probably start with the Fed’s balance sheet.
But we were told that giving money to the working class was the best kind of stimulus because they spend all the money. That means that in the current situation it will do the most harm in terms of stressing supply chains and driving up prices and creating shortages.
There are two current forms of inflation. One is temporary due to supply restrictions, and the other is permanent due to all the money printing governments around themworld have been engaged in. When you inject more dollars into the economy chasing the same goods, the dollar price of goods goes up.
The U.S. does not borrow the momey it spends any more - the Fed simply adds new debt to its balance sheet then transfers the money electronically to the government to spend. That’s inflationary. The only reason inflation hasn’t exploded is because the combination of shortages and covid restrictions have kept spending down, so all that money isn’t moving. But if you print another 4.7 trillion and do it in a bill that guarantees the money will move, Look out.
We’re all playing with matches, The only question is which one kicks off the forest fire. These spending bills (and Canada’s) at a time of record debts and deficits and absent a resession and slack demand are wildly irresponsible. Especiallh since they kick in new entitlements at a time when we should be looking to curb the ones we already have that we can’t pay for.
Also, spending the entire wad on progressive items like day care entitlements will burn all the political capital for new spending, meaning that climate change takes a back seat. Nothing in that bill will move the needle on climate change, but it will destroy the will for any more giant spending packages for some time. And I thought we were in a hurry.
And the few things that are in there to address climate change either won’t or will make it worse (the train nonsense), or are crippled by progressive demands such as the extra $4500 rebate for buying a car from a union car maker. You might as well just slap a tariff on Teslas and Nissans and Toyotas and VWs. And the ‘big three’ car makers the bill is supposed to help can’t come close to meeting their current demand for electric cars. So let’s bias the market to them!
It’s a terrible bill, and the sooner Democrats get away from it the better their re-election chances.
Oh, and how are you supposed to curb the Fed’s balance sheet while borrowing more money? Where do you think ot’s coming from?
If the Democrats don’t actually do, you know, Democratic priorities with the power they have, they have absolutely no chance of holding onto legislative power in 2022 (it will be tough as is, but abandoning Democratic priorities for working people means no chance at all). If deficits and debt matter, then they matter when Republicans are in power too. The Democrats shouldn’t politically disarm themselves just to end up with no power and Republicans ramp up deficits and debts once again.
The Democrats should do Democratic priorities. That’s why they’re in office.
This is as funny as believing that a Trump tweet has anything to do with reality! Sure, the Democrats should just do what the Republicans want (i.e. nothing) – that’s the way to get votes!
What a joke. A funny joke, but still a joke.
I really didn’t mean to post this here. It’s old news, but no one has mentioned it in this thread. I was going to send the link to my brother.
Oh well, ignore if meaningless to the topic at hand.
I never said they should do what Republicans want. There is a huge difference between what Republicans want and trillions in new spending including creating new entitlements while the current ones are going bankrupt.
Progressives have simply overreached. They are way out in front of where the American people are, and if they get what they want they’ll get shellacked in the polls and probably crater the economy. And their endless desire to spend more money is running up against a reality where the economy cannot provide for the demand it currently has. Adding to that demand with trillions of dollars will simply make everything worse.
It’s not a ‘stimulus’ when every new person the government hires has to be pulled from an existing job because there are not enough workers. It’s not a stimulus when every resource new government projects consume drive up prices and reduce availability for everyone else. And you are doing no good for the poor if you give them printed money and that results in inflation which drives up their food and rent bills and lowers the real value of their wages. The asset owning class will do fine as their assets inflate along with rhe currency. The working poor and retirement accounts get hammered.
Democrats used to understand this - way back in the ancient history of 2008 when they lectured us all about why ‘stimulus’ was required because of slack demand and idled resources. Now we have the opposite situation, but the recipe for fixing it is the same - a wild spending spree. Keynes is rolling in his grave.
If you want to be consistent with Keynesianism which you all claimed to believe in, you would be raising taxes and cutting spending as a way to slow demand, let supply chains catch up, and help curb inflation. And you’d be using all that revenue to pay down the debt so that next time there is slack you can afford to borrow more again to help.That"s counter-cyclical Keynesianism. Somehow, after paying lip service to Keynes for decades, Democrats now want to do the opposite.
My opposition to Keynesianism was not that stimulus couldn’t work during a recession, but that there’s never a will to pay back the money you borrowed when the economy is running hot. So only one half of Keynesianism is ever invoked, and it’s a one-way debt ratchet. The Democrats are proving that viewpoint correct,
Tell me - what is your plan if the new taxes and money printing create stagflation? You must at least concede that there’s a risk of that. How do you print and spend your way out of a problem created by too much printing and spending? What do you do if a real recession shows up next year, along with 6% inflation? What’s the plan?
I don’t buy that Keynesian economics only apply when Democrats are in power. All the chicken-little crap about spending (conveniently only when Democrats are in power) has not amounted to anything in decades, and the circumstances were very, very different in the 70s. I just don’t accept your premise. I think there’s another order of magnitude of fiscal slack in our economy, if not more. The Japanese economy has way, way more debt relatively speaking, without all of these consequences the fake conservatives rail on about (again, only when Democrats are in power).
The Democratic priorities largely poll extremely well, even in red states like WV. I think the Democrats should do policies that are popular – and childcare, healthcare, infrastructure, and the other priorities of this bill, poll extremely well.
Apprently Keynesianism doesn’t apply at all when Democrats are in power, because now you want to do the opposite of what Keynes says.
They poll well until you tell people you want to raise their taxes to pay for it. Climate change policy polls extremely wel, too, until you ask people how much they are willing to sacrifice for it.
Democrats skirt this by making promises to the masses that they’ll get free lunches and promising that only the rich will pay for it. And that never happens. The rich under Obama got richer faster than they did before. And it will happen again. You will promise to make the rich pay, but the real result will be inflation, and a lot of that 3.5 trillikn will be controlled and skim,ed off by rich people?
Bankers and financial people love Democrats. So do giant corporations who love a regulatory environment they can game at the expense of small business. Who do you think writes these giant bills?
You’re getting this wrong. That’s not what Keynes says. Inflation (and other indicators) are vastly different than they were in the 70s.
I won’t deny that there’s a risk of inflation ahead but it’s not due to transfer payments and treasury stimulus; it’s due to the pandemic’s perturbation of consumption and the disruption of the global supply chain. Both of these problems should resolve over time. If you want to entertain the idea that the Fed has been too loose with its stimulus, I am more open to that argument, and I don’t necessarily dismiss the need for tapering and even a rate hike at some point in the future. All things considered, though, I think central banks have generally done their job. Beyond that, I would actually advocate a more means-tested form of stimulus (as opposed to what has amounted to universal income over the past year), which I think is one way to view some of the stimulus that’s being proposed in the current legislation.
In any case, the solution to breaking the gridlocked supply chain isn’t to reduce disposable income. It would be different if we already had high labor force participation and steadily rising economic growth, but that’s not entirely the case. If anything, we’re looking at a potentially hazardous situation in which the most important stimulus that we’ve had throughout the pandemic - direct transfer payments to working class households - is winding down at a time when the pandemic-induced inflation is beginning to ramp up. We’re sorta drifting into stagflation territory here.